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A review by alundeberg
A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski
5.0
Wow! What a book. Set in post-WWII Poland, the unnamed narrator seeks to answer, "how does one learn to live after his life has been demolished?". Our elderly narrator receives an unnamed mysterious visitor, and together they sit and shell beans as the narrator tells the story of his life and tries to figure out how he has known the visitor before. His life is a tale of loneliness, survival, music, travel, illness, and the constant journey to make connections with others. Everyone he meets grapples with the scars of war, as it made people into things no one wants to become: orphans, widows, killers, saints, alone.
In America, our postwar stories are often of soldiers coming home from war. Aside from the Civil War, we have never had our homes and towns destroyed, our families killed, our ways of life obliterated. We do not know what it is like to rebuild from scratch. Often the war stories we hear are the ones of bravery and survival during a war, but we rarely hear of what life is like directly after one. This novel fills in that gap, and it is especially poignant that it is set in Poland, a country that was most devastated by WWII, whose people faced the greatest brutality, and the end of the war did not bring freedom, but a new life under a despotic regime.
Myśliwski has a very meditative and stream of consciousness style and this demands the readers full attention, but it is full of rewards.
In America, our postwar stories are often of soldiers coming home from war. Aside from the Civil War, we have never had our homes and towns destroyed, our families killed, our ways of life obliterated. We do not know what it is like to rebuild from scratch. Often the war stories we hear are the ones of bravery and survival during a war, but we rarely hear of what life is like directly after one. This novel fills in that gap, and it is especially poignant that it is set in Poland, a country that was most devastated by WWII, whose people faced the greatest brutality, and the end of the war did not bring freedom, but a new life under a despotic regime.
Myśliwski has a very meditative and stream of consciousness style and this demands the readers full attention, but it is full of rewards.